Author: Yucheng Cao

Last week we have changed several design issues, which could enable our web app to be more and comfortable to use.

This week’s topic is the assignment of the works. It means that we separated different parts of development, and each of us chose certain part to carry on. Our major developments are list of the notes, the details of the notes, login/signout session and the toolbar at the top of the page.

Unfortunately, we are not that familiar with the framework symfony. It pretty cost time to master the symfony, especially the configuration of the environment. Moreover, the course has not yet discussed the usage of “Model”, so we have no concrete idea of how to implement it yet. Therefore, the parts mentioned above are programmed without the implementation of the database.

Last but not least, we have reviewed the points with the coach (link) since last meeting. Cédric thought that it’s really convinient to use the framework in order to avoid duplicated works and focus on the logic of the application. He has also given us many valuable suggestions about the management of the project which enlighten our insights.

So that’s all for this week. Thanks for your reading. See you next week :).

Unfortunately, since last week I was not able to work with my partner, then we have decided to work separately and integrate our works together after reaching an agreement. My partner is responsible for making this set of figures in the following section by using Pencil.

Figure 1 The main page

Figure 2 The main page in another layout

As you can see here, the main page consists of a side bar on the left-hand side and the notes on the right-hand side, where we provide the users to apply many different layouts. To make things simple and to reach ergonomics’ goal, we’ve fixed the bar on top of the page. Once the users move their mouse to “Hi Jérôme”, a menu will spontaneously appear (see Figure 1), which enable them easily check their personal profiles and customize the settings. The users also can click the “List1, List2, List3” on the left-hand side to change the list of the presented notes, and meanwhile, the right-hand side will be correspondingly changed. If you forget where the note is, you can click the search bar and type any keywords that you remember no matter what the title, the contents or the tags are.

Figure 3 Details of the notes.

Clicking on a note will allow the user to review its concrete details, especially its content, tags, sub-notes and reminders. Each part of them can be adjusted by the user as they want.

Figure 4 the example of reminder

The login/signup is a popup window on the web page to improve the user’s experience by no need to leaving the page. The login window requires the username or email address and the password. The “forget password?” button aims to help user restore the password in case of forgetting. The signup window asks users to type in all the necessary information for sign up process, such as nickname, email address and password. Moreover, we further create a responsive design especially for the mobile users.

As above mentioned, this is our graphical interface. This interface will be consistently improved if we figure out a better solution.

Although there is no silver bullet, we could still improve our work in a less quick but more powerful way. That’s why we have a coach, an alumnus of our discipline who have been working for years.

This week we met our coach Cédric Houbart at Akedo, an amusement arcade in Lille. In fact, it is a very nice place to play and it has a big status of Link who is the character of the Legend of Zelda…

Back to the topic, we discussed about the project: what we are going to do, how we plan the development, which languages and which frameworks we are going to use. Cédric has expected a meet for every two weeks until the delivery to check the progress and give us professional suggestions.

Anyway, we have made sure all things in the project is clear. The next step will be start programming!